There is no better way to describe the international monetary system today than through the statement made in 1971 by U.S. Treasury Secretary, John Connally. He said to his counterparts during a Rome G-10 meeting in November 1971, shortly after the Nixon administration ended the dollar's convertibility into gold and shifted the international monetary system into a global floating exchange rate regime that, "The dollar is our currency, but your problem."

Non-farm payroll report comes out and Spoos [SPX futures] go down 32 handles. Gold starts off up $4, now down $6. This is totally rigged. I'm going to Vegas, at least the tables are more level then these markets and I get free booze and some really hot chicks.

The 'claims per ounce of gold' deliverable at current prices has spiked higher once again, to 126:1. As soon as the 'active month' of August was over at The Bucket Shop, JPM took a chunk of gold back off the registered for delivery roster.

The epicenter of gold’s intractable weakness over the past couple years has been the Federal Reserve’s upcoming rate-hike cycle. Everyone assumes higher interest rates will devastate zero-yielding gold, leaving it far less attractive. This premise led investors to avoid gold like the plague, and speculators to short sell it at wild record extremes. But provocatively, history proves gold thrives in Fed-rate-hike cycles.

Central banks of foreign countries resumed the withdrawal of their gold reserves from the US Federal Reserve, according to the last report by the last Fed reserve. A massive repatriation of gold began back in the beginning of 2014. During the period, a total of 250 tons of physical gold have been withdrawn from the Federal Reserve.

First it was Germany who redeemed 120 tons of physical gold in 2014; then it was the Netherlands who "secretly" redomiciled 122 tons of gold; then this past May, we learned that Austria would be the third "core" European nation to repatriate most of its offshore gold, held primarily in the Bank of England, redepositing it in Vienna and Switzerland.

While status quo-huggers are all too happy to point out gold and silver's lack of utter exuberance amid this week's carnage, perhaps they need to re-comprehend the difference between a heavily manipulated 'paper' market and the surging demand for physical precious metals that is evident in the 20-plus percent premium - and rising - being paid for silver bullion currently...

The Central Bank policy of dumping precious metals onto the market to rig prices has come to an end. Soon, Central Banks will no longer have the ability to control the paper price of gold and silver as true market fundamentals will finally kick in. Unfortunately, when the decades long market rigging of the precious metals finally ends, most investors will not be prepared.

Markets have "reached some kind of a tipping point," warns Marc Faber in this brief Bloomberg TV interview. Simply put, he explains, "because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks - there is no safe asset anymore."

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